Helping Users to Get Shockwave and Flash to Work

So I’m sick of getting emails from people telling me that my free online games don’t work, and then corresponding with them for 2 days, only to find out that they really don’t have Flash or Shockwave installed. So I devised a series of test pages that will find most issues. They start by looking at their OS and browser. I give them some warnings if they have Windows 95 or 98. You’d be surprised at how many people fall into that group. Then, I check their browser and recommend IE 7 for Windows users (and Firefox, of course). I know IE 6 should work fine, but I feel better asking them to keep things up-to-date.

Then I check for Flash and Shockwave on two different pages, using small embedded apps. I ask them to manually confirm their versions. I also give links to Adobe for downloads and support. Finally, I show my “uses all Xtras” Shockwave movie. It uses 3D, Flash, Text, sound and even speech xtras. You’d be surprised at how many Shockwave installs this movie has “healed” by simply triggering the Xtra downloads.

Anyway, I hope this series of pages helps be save time. Feel free to direct people there for help as well. I’ve included no ads on the pages, because I think the people going there are already suffering enough.

Oh, and if you can think of any other strings I can look for in the “user agent” string that could be clues to trouble, let me know. Right now, I just look for the basic browser (IE, Firefox, Safari) and the OS. And I also put a message in the NOSCRIPT tag, in case they turned off JavaScript.